The Walking Dead Season 1

This post is from the now defunct website “A GameDev Plays…”, copied here for posterity

About 2 hours before completing
The
Walking Dead my opinion of the game changed, for the second time. At
first I liked it, then I found it disappointing, but by the end I had
grown an appreciation for the game. After writing about How do you Do
It? and story-games yesterday,
here is an article from another
blog about
why the story in The Walking Dead works.

The Walking Dead is a Telltale game
based on the
comic
book of the same name (which now also has a
TV
series based on it too). For those not familiar with Telltale’s
distinctive style, it is a story-game where the player is given a choice
of various dialogue or action options. The game then promises that other
characters will remember those responses and act appropriately (a little
message often pops up like “Kenny will remember you supported him”).
These interactions are interspersed with point & click puzzle scenes and
quick time events. The
games are told in an episodic manner, each episode rising to a crescendo
and often a cliffhanger for the next. The first episode of a game is
often available for free download if you just want to see what its like - The Walking Dead episode 1 download is
here. Telltale
games’ art style is usually comic book like (so this one fits in great
with the source material).

At first I was amazed. I was making these decisions and they were
affecting the story! Imagine the number of possibilities. Then by the
second episode I realised that I wasn’t really changing anything. The
game may tell me that people would remember, but it didn’t seem to make
any significant difference. This is understandable. It would be a
programming and artwork nightmare to allow a significantly branching
story. Instead the game branches out for no more than a few minutes and
then returns regularly to known narrative chokepoints. The main story
beats (about one every 30 minutes of gameplay) are fixed. Furthermore,
these moments are binary, the same two possible choices are always
presented regardless of previous actions. When it became clear to me how
the game was working under the hood I was greatly disappointed - it is
not what I thought was promised. It is definitely not a choose your own
adventure.
This combined with the point & click sections of the game being either
very easy or devolving into annoying repetitive “hunt the pixel” puzzles
and the always irritating quick time events (some of which are designed
to be failed) started to put me off. However, the story was good, and
its not too long (each episode being around 2.5 hours) so I thought I’d
keep going.

I’m very glad I did finish it. After a few more episodes (including the
obligatory and cliched cannibal encounter) I began to see the point of
the game. It is not supposed to be a complex and branching story at all.
That conceit exists just to get the player involved and connected to the
characters. The real game is all about those binary story beats. They
are actually moral conundrums. The rest of the game and its faux
decisions are just trying to make the player care enough to consider
them properly and weigh the possible outcomes. They are decisions like
who gets food, or how much effort you make to save someone’s life in the
face of personal danger. Big questions, often with no good outcomes,
just equally bad, but slight different consequences. Such questions are
easily dismissed within most games. People die in games (and other forms
of entertainment) all the time - so what. The “trick” of The Walking
Dead is to add in all the other stuff around those decisions to make the
player take it seriously. And it works - largely. Most of the time I did
weigh the options carefully. In the end I didn’t even mind the quick
time events, they served to add some sense of jeopardy and action into
the story - stay awake! I also liked that at the end of each episode the
big decisions you made were highlighted and compared to other players’
decisions. On average I went with the same decision as the majority, but
a few times I was in the minority. This mechanic allows the player (me,
at least) to rethink their decisions when the pressure is off and
consider other points of view - I stand by all of them!